Wrestling the Dragon
by RebelFaerie
Summary: Viserys Targaryen is in exile, living on the streets in Pentos. The dragon howling in his brain tells him he will be king. Sometimes this is all he can hear. (A short fic in which Aerys Targaryen's madness is genetic, set slightly before S1E1.)


I love Viserys. Sue me. Arrogant white-blonde sons of bitches from evil families are my thing. Let me introduce you to my childhood crush on Draco Malfoy.

Anyway, here's this, written when I was supposed to be writing other things and about six seasons after it's relevant.

* * *

 _"When they write the history of my reign, sweet sister, they will say it began today."_

 _—_ Viserys Targaryen, "Winter Is Coming"

#

Viserys cannot picture himself as a king, though he tells his sister otherwise. He spins them stories as they wander the streets of Pentos, keeping to the shadows, staying out of sight. Beautiful stories, shot through with silver lies that sound like sterling. The glory of Dragonstone, with its battlements crooking along the ridge toward the sea like the spindled legs of spiders. The throne, hewn of dragonglass, only an imitation of the Iron Throne from which he will rule with her at his side.

He is a good storyteller.

He needs to be.

Dany does not. She is never expected to rule. She can be content with who she is. A descendent of the Targaryens, true rulers of the Seven Kingdoms. For her, that can be enough.

The dragon in him will not settle for this. Will not settle for less than everything he has to give. Will accept nothing but all.

Viserys gives it what he can.

#

They go hungry more days than they don't.

Viserys' stomach will not leave him in peace. Its growling is as loud as the dull roar in the back of his mind, the one he can never quite silence and which grows stronger as he weakens.

He feels starvation whittling him away, carving canyons into his face, stretching his body until he looks at his own shadow with disgust. He looks like a bundle of sticks lashed together into the mockery of a man.

There are some advantages. Tall and thin as he has become, he is faster than once he was, and a better thief. He can duck through narrow gates and half-closed windows with more grace than his sister. Dany, through some metabolic trick of survival, has somehow not yet lost her baby fat. She is six years younger than him, pink-skinned and bright-eyed, and nothing is expected of her.

When he steals food, he gives her half, sometimes more. It is good practice, he tells himself, for when he is king.

One day, he fears there will be nothing left of him but resentment and an empty stomach, howling its complaints to the stars.

#

Viserys sleeps badly in Pentos. He and Dany huddle barely sheltered in doorways, under bridges, in the narrow alleyways between buildings. The red clay of Pentos' streets coat him with a thin film until he feels like the Titan of Braavos, an impotent clay man with dull eyes and feet soldered to the earth.

He sits awake as Dany sleeps. Knees to his chest, hands interlaced around his shins, he watches as a cat traces the length of the alleyway, looking as mangy as he feels. He rests his chin on his knees and thinks of his childhood room at King's Landing. The room with a bed of his own, and a window overlooking the sea, and a door that he could lock himself. He would sit there on the floor, cross-legged like a sage, when the dragon came.

Of those times, he remembers his own screams, and little else.

He remembers when the roar in his brain would shatter everything between his ears, like a boulder dropped into a lake, shocking his calm into jagged waves. It hurt. He could not see, could not think. Sometimes there were dreams, through the pain. Other times, nothing existed but the roar.

He remembers waking hours later, lying on his back against the stone, drenched in sweat and trembling. Gradually, the noise would fade to a distant thrum, like the pulse of the sea below his window.

"Wrestling the dragon," his mother had called it. As if it were heroic. As if he would win.

Viserys has grown stronger since then. So has the dragon.

His monsters are no longer childhood monsters.

And there are no locks on the streets of Pentos.

#

The next night, Viserys sleeps, fitfully and briefly. He wakes with Dany's hand clamped over his mouth, her knees pinning his chest to the ground. He is shaking. He must have screamed. The dragon has come for him in the night.

Slowly, his body sweats out the fit, and he stops trembling.

Several minutes after that, Dany releases him. When he sits up, his head throbs with unbearable pain. His composure is shaken, and his thoughts twang like a longbow. They have not been discovered. She must have acted quickly.

He knows she was right to. They would be found otherwise, and captured, and killed. If he cannot control himself—and he is not sure he can—someone must. Still, her hand over his mouth frightens him more than the dragon itself. He cannot explain this, and does not like to try.

He suspects it has something to do with the dream.

This time, the dragon brought one.

He has dreamed he was a captive. Dany was dead, or imprisoned, or sold. He doesn't know. The dream didn't specify. He was paraded through the teeming streets of King's Landing with a slave's collar around his neck. The last of the Targaryens. A wild animal, chained and flaunted. The horseman who held the end of Viserys' chain did not show his face.

After all, Viserys has never seen Robert Baratheon in person. Who knows what the man looks like.

He was dragged to the Sept of Baelor and thrown into a cell underground, where a Westerosi maester waited. He struggled, but that did not matter. The guards threw him onto a table, where the maester bound him down with leather straps around his ankles, hips, wrists, neck. A gag was shoved down his throat to silence him. He retched, and can still taste the bile.

The maester lingered over his movements. Tested the straps, tightening each by half an inch. Then he paused, standing at Viserys' shoulder. With a look of scientific curiosity, he stroked the back of his palsied hand across Viserys' cheek. His fingertips hung there, and even in the dream Viserys had thought of Rhaella, holding him to her breast, stroking his hair when he woke in tears after the dragon.

And then the maester took a blade to Viserys' skull. Opened him wide to the sound of muffled shrieks and prodded his brain with dull knives, probing for the source of the madness.

His head burns with the memory. He winces.

It is little wonder he screamed.

He pushes one hand through his hair and closes his eyes. The cool blackness of his eyelids is a comfort.

"Viserys?" Dany asks quietly.

He lies down again and rolls over, turning his back to her. "Go back to sleep, little sister."

He feigns sleep himself until he is sure she has. The dream nags at his consciousness, but he tries not to think about it.

Though the dragon fights him, it is within him. More than that, it is him. If the roaring beast dies, so too will he.

Viserys does not sleep again that night.

#

Viserys is the rightful lord of the Seven Kingdoms. The only living son of Aerys Targaryen.

He is lost and starving in the dust of the Free Cities.

A king without a kingdom without a people without food without shoes. A king of nothing.

Nothing-king. No-king. Unkinged.

 _unhinged_

 _The hinges of a door he cannot lock. Forced open by fire, melted apart. Open the gates and let the armies storm the keep,_

No. Be still.

 _booted feet against Dragonstone, burning murdering_

No—

 _Close the door_

 _it will come in through the door don't let it in close the door close it—_

Viserys stumbles.

Swaying toward the side of the alley, he catches himself on the wall of the nearest building. Its red clay is rough beneath his palm. Dany offers her arm as support, but he jerks away, nearly falling again. He'll be damned before he leans on her.

When he is ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they will sing songs of these bloody days. How the Lost Dragon rose from the ashes, silver-winged and glorious. Reborn. He is mixing his metaphors, and knows it.

Above, a sparrow flits through the alley. An exiled dragon, he thinks. His thoughts are slow and coated in dust. The broad flap of wings. A jaw that can crush mountains.

A fucking _sparrow._

He watches its progress, leaning still on the wall. As it passes, the sparrow takes a lurid shit on Viserys' shoulder.

He sinks down the wall to the dust, throws his head back, and laughs until he is no longer sure whether he is laughing or weeping.

At this point, he supposes, it hardly matters.

#

When he reaches the steps of Illyrio's palace on the edge of Pentos, he sinks to his knees. The paving-stones are hot through the threadbare fabric of the trousers that no longer fit him in a hundred ways, made for a boy both broader and shorter than the man he now is.

Dany stands beside him, two steps back, quiet. He is grateful she can still stand. He hates her for it.

Viserys has not slept in a week. Every night now, the roar in his head rumbles in his ear, breathing down his neck. He no longer knows for whom he intends to beg sanctuary, himself or the dragon.

A king does not kneel, he tells himself.

He cannot stand.

The guards resolve the matter for him. They take Viserys, one by each arm, and drag him to his feet, pinning his wrists behind his back. Through the fog, he takes pleasure in knowing that two men must subdue him, while the man holding a dagger to Dany's throat may be no older than she is.

Illyrio, attracted by the commotion, emerges from the palace. Viserys' vision flickers. One moment the merchant is at the door, and then the two men are chest to chest. Illyrio's breath smells of saffron and Dornish wine.

Viserys may not be able to stand unaided, but he can meet Illyrio's eyes with the arrogant boldness the dragon demands.

"Who are you, beggar?" Illyrio asks.

Viserys smiles. It emerges at a crueler angle than he meant, but he cannot help that. The dragon's smile is always cruel.

When he is ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they will sing songs of this moment.

"Viserys Targaryen," he says. He has not spoken his name in so long. The resonance of it pleases him. "Son of Aerys Targaryen. Rightful King of the Andals and the First Men. Lord of the Seven Kingdoms."

Illyrio stares. Good. Let him.

When the guards release Viserys, his knees buckle, and only Illyrio's well-timed arm keeps him from falling again.

"Are you unwell, sir?" Illyrio asks.

He has chosen the wrong honorific, Viserys thinks, but there will be time to address that later.

"I have come," Viserys says, ignoring the question, "for—"

But the red clay chokes his parched throat, and he breaks off, coughing. His gaunt body doubles over, expelling dust like useless fire.

Illyrio escorts him inside in a state of wonder. He speaks, words of fealty, useless but pleasing.

Viserys cannot hear him over the dragon's laughter.

#

Illyrio casts one more glance at his uninvited guests and postpones further discussion until the following morning. This is just as well. Viserys feels as if his brain is drifting two feet above his body. If he looked at his reflection in the mirror, he thinks, he could see through himself. A transparent corpse with silver hair and wild eyes.

There is no hiding anything with eyes like that.

There is much he must hide from Illyrio.

Viserys is shown to an airy set of rooms, all windows and linen curtains and a bed that could sleep five. A servant girl waits as he strips and then takes his clothes from him. To be burned, he hopes.

As he bathes, the clay dust drifts up from him, staining the water a gritty ochre. It looks as though he has been stabbed in the bath.

Clean, exhausted, Viserys lies across the bed diagonally, taking up as much space as possible. The mattress under his back is heaven. His last thought before he falls asleep is a memory of the streets of Pentos, and the pain of his protruding spine pressed against hard earth.

He is dead to the world when the servant returns with a bowl of spiced stew and a flagon of wine. He does not dream, but into his sleep finds the scent of cinnamon.

#

When Viserys awakes, he is ravenous.

Someone has covered him with a blanket as he slept. The gesture is oddly touching. He smiles as he sits up, and looks to the open window. Late morning sunlight pours through, pooling in gold along the floor.

He has slept for twenty-six hours.

Illyrio's servants have left fresh clothes for him at the foot of the bed. Black leather trousers and a silver tunic patterned like scales. It is as if the merchant knew he would come.

He dresses, trying not to look at his body as he does. Even bathed and rested, it disgusts him. From the bottom rim of his vision, he sees his ribs sing like twelve arrow shafts through his skin.

A mask can hide any weakness, he reminds himself.

Without looking, he twists his hair behind his ears and knots it, the way his father wore his.

#

His own weakness irritates him. He is twenty-one, in the prime of life, and yet the walk from his room to Illyrio's hall has exhausted him.

Viserys sits heavily. "Where is my sister?" he asks.

"The princess is asleep," the merchant says. "My wife's ladies will see she is well cared for. You both must recover your strength."

If Illyrio says anything of interest after this, Viserys does not hear it. A servant has entered bearing food, and suddenly his attention is elsewhere. Brown bread dusted with flour from the oven, slick with honey. Fish, fileted and salted, still smelling of the net. A pastry he does not recognize, filled with spices and vegetables he recognizes still less. Sweet water and small beer.

Illyrio waits. He must understand that men have priorities. Even kings.

Objectively, Viserys eats almost nothing. His body is so unused to food that a few mouthfuls seem a feast.

He fixes Illyrio with what he hopes is his father's stare. "I thank you for your hospitality," he says.

 _Thank him for nothing_.

 _You are his king,_

 _you are the dragon_ _you could kill him if you chose to_

 _let the dragon_

 _breathe_

 _open the door_ _—_

Viserys clenches his fists until his palms ache. A cold sweat has broken out on his brow.

"What happened to you, Your Grace?" Illyrio asks. "We thought the last of the Targaryens had been killed."

Viserys laughs. It is pitched too high and clangs discordant.

Hold it together, he thinks. You need this man. You need him.

"Not for lack of trying," he says. "The usurper did his best. My sister and I were smuggled out of Dragonstone. A kindness, from a friend."

Illyrio leans in, a look of conspiracy in his eyes. Something in the merchant's expression reminds Viserys of his father, though he cannot say what. He thinks of Aerys presiding over his small council, sprawling across the Iron Throne with a smirk contorting his face, as if daring the swords to pierce him.

Viserys does not know whether this is memory or imagination. He has no one left to ask.

"You are the one true king of Westeros," Illyrio says. The dragon hums in approval. "Tell me what you need, and I will see that you find it."

What does he need? Viserys is no longer used to being asked. He feels the roar grow louder. The dark gnaws at the edge of his vision

 _vision visions visionary_

 _a prophet_

 _the prince that was promised_

 _you were promised_

 _to lie to a king is death—_

He takes a shaky inhale, then lets it out through his nose. The dragon is bolder now. There was a time when it did not hunt during the day. There was a time when it gave warning.

"I will need an army," Viserys says. Where the calm comes from in his voice, the gods only know. "If you have suggestions for where to find one, I am listening."

#

Illyrio has had time to think while Viserys slept.

He has a suggestion.

The dragon approves.

Dany is six years younger than him, and nothing has ever been expected of her.

It is time she felt the pressure of expectation, Viserys thinks.

#

Viserys is not sure how the dragon was born.

Maybe his father gave it to him. The birthright of a second son. To Rhaegar the throne, to Viserys the dragon. An honor, no doubt, as it was intended.

Of course, reality has turned out otherwise. The best-laid plans of men and kings.

Maybe Robert Baratheon created it. Dragons are born of the flames, and Viserys can still smell the smoke from the sack of Dragonstone. It's possible the heat from his dreams has kept the egg warm over the years and hatched it slowly. Gods know he has thought of it enough.

He does not like this explanation. It gives the usurper too much credit.

Maybe it was born in the streets of the Free Cities. The gritty red clay of Pentos may have been its egg, and Viserys' feet have been treading that shell for sixteen years.

Surely that is long enough for something to crack.

It is possible, of course, that none of these are true.

It is possible that Viserys simply is the dragon, and always has been.

At this point, he supposes, it hardly matters.


End file.
